The Wild Hunt

Caden Lyndsey was a Man of God. He battled demons, saw visions of the
future, and wielded the fire of Heaven.

He lost his faith, but not his power.

Now, his visions drive him toward rural Washington. A madman seeks to
summon the Norse god Wotan and unleash the Wild Hunt on an unsuspecting
populace. If he succeeds, hundreds will die. Caden must battle witches,
monsters, and ancient deities in order to stop him.

I was listening to Joe Rogan and Sam Harris discuss free will, and figured I’d share some thoughts on the subject.

I side with Harris on this; I believe that “I” is an emergent phenomena, and that free choice is an illusion.

From a scientific point of view, our brain is a machine. It’s orders of magnitude more complex than a computer, but fundamentally no different. Chemicals and electrical impulses combine to create thoughts and emotions, to create “me.” In a very real sense, we are these hormonal surges and electrical firings. Our thoughts, our responses, and our desires do not exist outside of these real, physical systems.

That raises the question: if there is free will, what is its source? If we examine the universe scientifically, the machine that is our brain operates from one of two sources: determinism or free will.

Determinism

In a deterministic universe, reality is essentially a giant watch. It was wound up at the beginning of time and it will proceed until the end, mechanically.

If determinism is true, we can view our brains as an infinitely complex set of cogs and gears. In this scenario, we have no more free will than a car; if someone pushes the gas peddle, it goes forward. Our inputs and resulting actions are more complex, but the principle is the same. Or, you can view the mind as software being run on the computer that is our brain; if you provide the exact same inputs to a piece of software, it will always behave the exact same way, because it cannot do anything else.

In this reality, we are not responsible for our choices, because our brain is simply playing out the predetermined script.

Randomness

In a random universe, our thoughts and actions aren’t predetermined, they’re the result of chance. Something, maybe something operating at the quantum level, causes an input to our brains, our brains process that input, and we act based on that processing.

In this reality, our brains are like software with a random seed; our thoughts and actions cannot be predicted, because we don’t know all of the inputs, but if we were given the exact same inputs again, we would behave in the exact same way.

In truth, our minds are probably a combination of both determinism and randomness. Quantum activity provides random input, but at larger levels, we play out our responses deterministically. This isn’t to say that the process is simple, just that it’s mechanical.

If our mind works in either (or both) of these two ways, there is no free will. We are either playing out a predetermined script, or we are responding mechanically to random inputs. For free will to exist, its source must be something outside of physical reality. Which brings us to:

The Soul

Theists, mystics, and pretty much everyone else point to the soul as the source of our free will. In this version of the universe, our brain isn’t so much a machine as it is a radio, which sends information to and receives decisions from the soul. The fact that damaging the brain can alter the personality is explained away as merely a signal degradation; the soul remains uninjured, but also incapable of communicating perfectly with the brain.

There are several problems with this, the first being testability. The soul is a hypothesis, and to validate a hypothesis, you need to be able to test it. So far as I know, no one has been able to put forth a set of testable criteria that would point toward the existence of absence of a soul.

If our thoughts, desires, and actions really are a product of the soul, communicated to the brain, how would that be measurably different that if those same thoughts, desires, and actions arose naturally from the brain itself? Until this question can be answered, the concept of a soul remains firmly outside of science. People can hope that we have a soul, even believe that we have a soul, but there’s no way to prove it.

But even if we accept the idea that our mind is a product of the soul, we still don’t have room for free will. Why? Because the soul is a thing, created with certain properties, and responding to stimulus based on those properties. Just like the brain, the soul is either a deterministic piece of machinery, or it is a random number generator, or it is a combination of both.

And if we assume that we have a soul in the Christian sense, the case for fee will actually gets even worse. Take this verse:

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son …-Romans 8:29

Two concepts are inseparably linked here: foreknowledge and predestination. If you have a god that is all-knowing and all-powerful, literally nothing can happen outside of his or her design. Every choice you make–every sin committed and every virtue lived out–was known ahead of time, before the deity ever created you. And when it was knitting you together in your mother’s womb, to borrow a phrase, it knew exactly what you would do, for every single moment in your life. The deity knew when you would have your first kiss, when you would tell your first lie, when you would be filled with anger, when you would be overcome with love, when you would be born and when you would die.

No, the idea of a soul makes free will even less likely, not more.

So what does this mean?

We’ve looked at three possibilities: a mechanical universe, a random universe, and a supernatural universe, and we haven’t found room for free will in any of them. So what does this mean?

In practice, not much. A lot of what we know about human psychology, about motivation, willpower, and so on, is still true. It still makes sense to reward behaviors that we desire and punish behaviors we dislike, because the machinery of our brain will respond to those inputs in a fairly predictable fashion.

It does, however, kind of eliminate the justification for retribution. It makes sense to punish undesirable behavior as a deterrent, but not as vengeance. The fact that a person is a murderer stems from their genetics, their family, their experiences, and countless other variables that are entirely outside of their control. Sometimes its simply a facet of the hardware of the brain malfunctioning. The fact that a person was born without dopamine receptors is no more their fault than the fact that they were born in poverty. Again, punishment can make sense as a deterrent, but there is no moral basis for revenge.

Of course, the desire for revenge is also born into us. Turtles all the way down.

Finally, it should alter the way we go about achieving our goals. If we’re on a diet, for example, rather than beating ourselves up because we run out of willpower and eat a slice of pizza, we should examine what science tells us about choices and willpower, and use that to get the desired result out of the software of our brain.

We shouldn’t look at ourselves as weak, or as morally flawed, but as a system, a system with rules that can be manipulated to achieve our goals.

If you haven’t seen the debate between Bill Nye (the Science Guy) and Ken Ham (the Answers in Genesis guy), you can watch it here. There isn’t a whole lot new here, if you’re at all familiar with the subjects of evolution and creationism, but I think it’s worth watching just as a template for an actual, reasonable debate.

Short summary: Bill Nye believes that the scientific method is the best way of gaining knowledge about our world, and thus believes in evolution, while Ken Ham believes that the Bible is the best means of gaining knowledge about our world, and thus believes in creationism.

One of the tactics Ham used to try and discredit evolution is the (made up) distinction between “observational” and “historical” science. Ham contends that it’s fine to draw conclusions about something you can actually observe, like the changes in Darwin’s finches’ beaks, but its impossible to draw accurate conclusions about things you did not personally witness. Ham uses this trick to dismiss literally every piece of evidence in favor of evolution and an old earth, simply by asking “were you there?”

“Were you there?” is Ham’s trump card. He states that because no scientist witnessed the Big Bang, we have no evidence for the Big Bang, and because we didn’t witness descent from a common ancestor, there is no valid evidence for the most fundamental premise in biology. Instead, we should trust the Bible, written by God, who did the creating, and Adam and Eve, who did the … being created, because they are first hand accounts.

I’m going to ignore the idea that something must be directly observed in order to draw a conclusion about it. Enough people watch CSI to know that’s bullshit. Instead, I’m going to ask Ken Ham one simple question: “were you there?”

Because Ham is claiming to know that Adam and Eve witnessed the events in Genesis. But was Ham there to verify Adam and Eve were around? And Ham claims that God inspired the Prophets to write the Bible, but was Ham there to see that moment of inspiration? Can Ham personally verify that God spoke to the Prophets, or that the Prophets correctly transcribed the conversation?

Because if not, everything in Ham’s creation museum is just “historical” science, and by Ham’s own claims needs to be dismissed outright.

DailyGalaxy has an interesting article on quantum entanglement, and how certain properties of quantum mechanics can seem to break the chain of cause-and-effect:

The authors experimentally realized a “Gedankenexperiment” called “delayed-choice entanglement swapping”, formulated by Asher Peres in the year 2000. Two pairs of entangled photons are produced, and one photon from each pair is sent to a party called Victor. Of the two remaining photons, one photon is sent to the party Alice and one is sent to the party Bob. Victor can now choose between two kinds of measurements. If he decides to measure his two photons in a way such that they are forced to be in an entangled state, then also Alice’s and Bob’s photon pair becomes entangled. If Victor chooses to measure his particles individually, Alice’s and Bob’s photon pair ends up in a separable state.

Modern quantum optics technology allowed the team to delay Victor’s choice and measurement with respect to the measurements which Alice and Bob perform on their photons.

“We found that whether Alice’s and Bob’s photons are entangled and show quantum correlations or are separable and show classical correlations can be decided after they have been measured”, explains Xiao-song Ma, lead author of the study.

…

“Within a naïve classical word view, quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events”, says Anton Zeilinger at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, the University of Vienna.

I’ve heard of this being done with the Double Slit Experiment, too. In short, the double slit experiment shows that light behaves both as a wave and as a particle, depending on whether or not you observe the photons as they pass through the slits. If you’re watching them they act like particles, and if you’re not watching, they behave like waves.

The creep/cool thing is that you can make that choice after the fact. If you record which slit photons move through and then look at the pattern they create, you’ll see particles. But if you record the data and then destroy it without examining it, you’ll see a wave.

It may sound too good to be true, but a mechanical engineer working out of the University of Delaware has come up with a way to produce hydrogen without any undesirable emissions such as carbon dioxide.

The totally clean fuel production is made possible due to a new solar reactor created by Erik Koepf that only relies on concentrated sunlight, zinc oxide, and water to produce hydrogen.

The reactor is capable of using sunlight to increase the heat inside its cylindrical structure above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Zinc oxide powder is then gravity fed through 15 hoppers into the ceramic interior where it converts to a zinc vapor. At that point the vapor is reacted with water separately, which in turn produces hydrogen.

As well as a lack of emissions, the other good news is that the zinc oxide can apparently be reused, meaning the solar reactor is theoretically self sustaining as it only relies on materials and energy that are renewable.

It’s still in the testing stages, and it remains to be seen whether or not this is efficient enough to warrant scaling it up to industrial size, but this is kind of awesome. Something like this could, no joke, eliminate a great deal of our dependency on oil, and would be a fantastic alternative to many of the energy sources we use today.

And it’s being tested in Switzerland, which means no Paid For By Shell Congressmen can kill it.

Slashdot reports that the faster-than-light neutrinos are actually just regular old subluminal neutrinos, and that fault hardware was responsible for the (briefly exciting) error:

It would appear that the hotly debated faster-than-light neutrino observation at CERN is the result of a fault in the connection between a GPS unit and a computer. This connection was used to correct for time delays in the neutrino flight, and after fixing the correction the researchers have found that the time discrepancy appears to have vanished.

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